Word: ais
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...questions of judgment that are too subtle for conventional data processing, however powerful. After years of false starts and overblown promises, the new systems, called expert or knowledge-processing systems, have exploded onto the commercial scene in the U.S., Western Europe and Japan, which is also trying to develop AI technologies. "We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars developing computer power that has set us adrift in a sea of data," says Thomas P. Kehler, CEO of IntelliCorp, a California software company. The new systems promise to put that information to work...
...handful of these systems existed in business and government. Now there are an estimated 1,000 to 3,000 in daily use, and the number is increasing by 50% annually. They grew out of much touted artificial-intelligence research into human decision making in the 1960s and '70s. AI thus far has failed to reduce human intelligence to hardware and software. But in the quest to build machines that see, move, communicate and think like humans, AI has produced offshoots with evident commercial potential. Says Herbert Schorr, who spearheads IBM's efforts to commercialize AI: "Knowledge processing allows...
...Corp. and E.I. du Pont de Nemours. They and others are using second-wave technology not only to bring computers to bear on problems that until now have been bypassed by the information revolution but also to extend the range and availability of human expertise. Says Edward Feigenbaum, an AI pioneer and co-author of a | forthcoming book on second-wave success stories: "Every system we have looked at improved productivity by more than an order of magnitude -- that's like the difference between a car and a jet plane...
...empty shell into which programmers could pour all kinds of different expertise. In 1977 a team of Stanford researchers under Feigenbaum dubbed the new shell Emycin (for Empty Mycin) and used it to build several more expert systems. Emycin spurred a number of start-up companies, led by AI entrepreneurs like Feigenbaum, to build knowledge shells for the commercial market...
What saved the fledgling industry was the discovery that applied artificial intelligence could produce concrete results when properly used. In 1978 the Massachusetts-based Digital Equipment Corp. joined forces with AI Theoretician John McDermott of Carnegie Mellon University to develop XCon (for Expert Configurator), a system to assist salesmen in choosing parts for DEC computer systems from among tens of thousands of alternatives. XCon went on line in 1981, and for several years it was the only expert system in commercial use that companies could employ to gauge the worth of their technology. Today XCon configures almost every Digital computer...